Sports history is no longer a marginal academic subject. It has now been recognised that sport is a significant cultural activity that matters to millions of people and ought to be studied by academic researchers. Correctly practised, sports history is a counter to nostalgia, myth and invented tradition. It can be considered the sports memory of a nation: without sports history there is sporting amnesia.
The respected editors of this reference collection have brought together the best and most challenging work in the field for the first time. Covering a wide range of sports, regions, debates, approaches and eras,Sports Historyis a truly comprehensive collection, divided across four themed volumes:

Volume One: An Unfinished Journey

Volume Two: More Than a Game

Volume Three: A Force for Good?

Volume Four: Flexible Boundaries

VOLUME ONE: AN UNFINISHED JOURNEY

Wray Vamplew and Mark Dyreson

Introduction

Part One: Pioneers

John Rickards Betts

The Technological Revolution and the Rise of Sport, 1850–1900

Dennis Brailsford

Sporting Days in Eighteenth Century England

W.F. Mandle

Cricket and Australian Nationalism in the Nineteenth Century

Part Two: Inside and Outside the Archives

Douglas Booth

Sites of Truth or Metaphors of Power? Refiguring the Archive

Susan K. Cahn

Sport Talk: Oral History and Its Uses, Problems, and Possibilities for Sport History

Linda Borish and Murray Phillips

Sport History as Modes of Expression: Material Culture and Cultural Spaces in Sport and History

Part Three: Using Theory

Douglas Booth

The Consecration of Sport: Idealism in Social Science Theory

Wray Vamplew

Concepts of Capital: An Approach Shot to the History of the British Sports Club before 1914

Bob Stewart

The Nature of Sport under Capitalism and Its Relationship to the Capitalist Labour Process

Colin Howell

Assessing Sport History and the Cultural and Linguistic Turn

Part Four: Contextual Approaches

How to Read Historical Context

Eric Hobsbawm

Mass-Producing Traditions: Europe, 1870–1914

How to Avoid Misreading Historical Context

Donald Kyle

“The Only Woman in All Greece”: Kyniska, Agesilaus, Alcibiades and Olympia

Part Five: Innovatory Approaches

How to Read the Media

Michael Oriard

Reading, Watching, and Listening to Football

How to Swim against the Currents of Context

Synthia Sydnor

A History of Synchronized Swimming

Part Six: Areas of Challenge: Emotion, Children and Eroticism

Emotion

Barbara Keys

Senses and Emotions in the History of Sport

Children

Wray Vamplew

Child Work or Child Labour? The Caddie Question in Edwardian Golf

Joyce Kay

A Blinkered Approach? Attitudes towards Children and Young People in British Horseracing and Equestrian Sport

Eroticism

Allen Guttmann

Spartan Girls, French Postcards, and the Male Gaze: Another Go at Eros and Sports

VOLUME TWO: MORE THAN A GAME

Part One: Gender

Elliott Gorn

“Gouge and Bite, Pull Hair and Scratch”: The Social Significance of Fighting in the Southern Backcountry

Pamela Grundy

From Amazons to Glamazons: The Rise and Fall of North Carolina Women’s Basketball, 1920–1960

Jaime Schultz

Caster Semenya and the “Question of Too”: Sex Testing in Elite Women's Sport and the Issue of Advantage

Part Two: Race and Ethnicity

Kendall Blanchard

Basketball and the Culture-Change Process: The Rimrock Navajo Case

Benjamin Rader

The Quest for Subcommunities and the Rise of American Sport

Mark Dyreson

Basketball and Magic in ‘Middletown’: Locating Sport and Culture in American Social Science

Part Three: Associativity

Stefan Szymanski

A Theory of the Evolution of Modern Sport

Klaus Nathaus

The Role of Associativity in the Evolution of Modern Sport: A Comment on Stefan Szymanski’s Theory

Part Four: Sport as Consumer Culture

Stephen Hardy

Where Did You Go, Jackie Robinson? Or, the End of History and the Age of Sport Infrastructure

Geraldine Biddle-Perry

The Rise of “The World’s Largest Sport and Athletic Outfitters”: A Study of Gamage’s of Holborn, 1878–1913

Part Five: Sport and Nation`

Barbara Keys

Soviet Sport and Transnational Mass Culture in the 1930s

Andrew Morris

“I Can Compete!” China in the Olympic Games, 1932 and 1936

Mark Dyreson

The Republic of Consumption at the Olympic Games: Globalization, Americanization, and Californization

Part Six: Sport and International Relations

Peter Beck

The Relevance of the “Irrelevant”: Football as a Missing Dimension in the Study of British Relations with Germany

Sayuri Guthrie-Shimizu

Japan's Sports Diplomacy in the Early Post-Second World War Years

Matthew Taylor

Global Players? Football, Migration and Globalization

Part Seven: Sport and the First World War

Eliza Riedi and Tony Mason

‘Leather’ and the Fighting Spirit: Sport in the British Army in World War I